West with the Night

In this autobiography of an Englishwoman who grew up in Kenya, Beryl Markham writes superbly of horses, hunting, lovers, and flying; she describes surviving a lion attack with wry humor, and tells how in 1936 she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. "Did you read Beryl Markham's book?" wrote Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins. "She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.... The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true.... A bloody wonderful book."